'I have never been as impressed by an election as a popular festival as in India'

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Indians must love democracy. I have been a professional observer of many elections in America and in Australia as well as in my own country but I do not think I have ever been as impressed by an election as a popular festival as I was last week.

A newcomer to India, I jolted down country roads, around Hyderabad looking at the patient queues of voters, the meticulous officials, the excited knots of partisans.

And I saw, or thought I saw, a remarkable commitment to the processes of democratic choice. And observing the very successful experiment with the advanced voting machines, I felt that I was coming from a developing to a developed country.

Not that I'm uncritical. I can't say that the alternatives offered to the voters of Andhra Pradesh seemed, either of them, very inspiring. And I was a bit puzzled by the coverage of the results and the comment on them.

The newspapers and still more the broadcasters seemed very slow to catch the trend. On the night of Thursday, January 6, I met a very senior official who assured me that the result was wide open, although anyone with an eye for the trends could have seen the inevitable five hours earlier.

And the politicians themselves appeared oddly reluctant to make any statements about what was happening, even when they were winning.

Indians believe that India is unique. And of course it is - special and wonderful and difficult. But a lot of the rules that apply to the rest of the world do in fact apply to India. Election results, as the accompanying article shows, have their regularities: it is possible to project trends from an early report to a final outcome and to assume that neighbouring seats (and even neighbouring states) will, on average, behave in a similar fashion.

Equally it must be possible to conduct reliable opinion polls in India, as it is in every other major democracy. Obviously in dealing with so huge and diverse a population special problems are posed by caste and sect and literacy. But any difficulties are certainly surmountable.

I remember being told 20 years ago, after polling had become well established in Britain, that it would never work in Ireland - the Irish character would always deceive the interviewer who'd face answers like 'Well now that's an interesting question. And what would you be thinking yourself?' But very soon polls did become established in Ireland and they have a respectable record in election forecasting there.

Volatile Electors: INDIA TODAY's opinion poll did not fare well in Andhra Pradesh. Why? The last 30 years have seen a lot of good poll forecasts (including some, in India) of elections and a few disasters.

The disasters have sometimes been due to the chances of sampling and sometimes to errors in the field, and sometimes to inadequate allowance for the 'don't knows' and the refusals. But the most common cause - and the one that I would guess was most important in Andhra Pradesh - is late swing; voters have every right to change their minds in the two weeks between the interview date and the actual voting.

Election in India (as in Britain) are becoming increasingly volatile and, faced with a totally new party, they might well switch at the last moment. The evidence is lacking, but I'd certainly sympathise with pollsters offering this explanation.

Election forecasting is not in itself very important - but it does provide a supreme public test of opinion poll methodology. Democracy is about popular control of what those who rule them do. It cannot be left just to the occasional visit to the voting booth.

A more continuous discourse is needed. Therefore the establishment of a competent and respected opinion polling industry must be on balance a great asset to any democracy.

David Butler, a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, has been on a short visit to India. He has written many books about electoral systems and about British electoral behaviour.

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